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Unpicking the Mystery of the Body’s ‘Second Brain’

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

To pursue her research documenting the variety of enteric glia, Marissa Scavuzzo of Case Western Reserve University had to develop new methods to work in the gut’s harsh environment. Enteric glia “seem to be sitting at the interface of a lot of different tissue types and biological processes,” said Seyedeh Faranak Fattahi, an assistant professor of cellular molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2019, when Scavuzzo started her postdoctoral research at Case Western under Paul Tesar, a world expert in glial biology, she knew she wanted to unravel the diversity of enteric glia.

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